Technocratic Education and Its Discontents (part 1)

A new year gets a new framing

Author

James Shanahan
January 14, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

I’m back from my travels and regrouped from the holidays and New Years. Let’s get to it!

Last Year’s Framing

If you looked at my one-year anniversary post on Jan 2nd, you’d see in the list of five things I learned that year. My attempt was to tie together some themes in my posts from the first year of my writing publicly as Scholastic Alchemy, but one set of posts stood out to me as being linked again and again: the charter school treaty. Menefee-Libey’s idea of a conservative and liberal treaty that placed a boundary around the kinds of education reform the political system would undertake structured a lot of my thinking last year. I regularly focused on his point that the treaty collapsed at the end of the Obama administration or, depending on whether you had a conservative or liberal perspective at the time, under the first Trump administration. With the end of this informal treaty, all options for school reform were on the table, including the large-scale changes to funding and even efforts to completely end public schooling.

In other words, Menefee-Libey’s idea about this informal treaty became a conceptual framework that I turned to again and again to better understand and explain the politics of education and how they’ve changed. I think it’s really important for people to recognize just how much things have changed and I a bit shocked that so many liberals don’t seem to recognize it. Literally this morning Matt Yglesias posted about education and still seems to think that everyone is going to come around to some kind of revamp of NCLB-style school accountability.

One of the striking things about the No Child Left Behind era is that a lot of the abstract, high-level criticisms of the law made perfect sense. It’s not really reasonable to expect public schools to eliminate “achievement gaps” or deliver universal proficiency. In a country with millions of kids, if you have any kind of reasonably rigorous standards, then someone is going to end up left behind.

But despite these conceptual flaws, the simple step of measuring results and imposing (generally very mild) consequences for bad performance was good.

In all fairness I should note that Matt does finally acknowledge that something different is happening on the right:

Instead, there’s been a ton of enthusiasm for vouchers and education savings accounts, which are basically efforts to replace public-school funding with tax breaks for spending money on your kids’ education. The evidence on the effectiveness of these programs has generally been negative in terms of the impact on student achievement. This is true including (and perhaps especially) in states like Tennessee and Louisiana, where the mainstream public-school systems have been getting good results.

The basic issue here, as we know from the higher education market, is that schools don’t really compete on the basis of being highly effective at teaching students.

I’m glad to see Matt making this point but I don’t think he’s really engaging with the fact that conservative politicians and activists around the country really are moving in a different direction than before. Matt doesn’t communicate that there’s an ideological shift (or return to form, perhaps) that’s happened and effective public schooling simply isn’t a concern on the right anymore. I think I need a new framework for the new year in order to help explain why.

Technocrats and the Revolt of the Public

Through conservative heterodox economist Arnold Kling, I learned about the book Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. Kling summarizes the book like this:

1. Starting around 2000, the amount of information on the Internet doubles in a year. If that goes on for ten years, there would have been 420 one thousand times the information in 2010 as in 2000. Even if that number is imprecise (and it has to be imprecise), there is way more information out there than there used to be. The increase is staggering.

2. 20th-century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment. Politicians, journalists, and academics now are overwhelmed by: (a) what they don’t know that others do know. Think of citizens using cell phones to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists; and (b) by the amount that others know about them that they used to able to keep secret. Think of President Kennedy trying to get away with his sexual escapades today.

3. The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much information that they cannot control. They see new competitors as illegitimate (“fake news”) and they blame others for elites’ loss of status and respect.

4. The general public is frustrated by the arrogance of the elites, and they have the means to assemble revolts. This has happened everywhere, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests to the January 6 riot. These revolts have no organization and so they end up not accomplishing much.

5. Society requires authority. But the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information. And they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world. They cannot operate at Internet speed (it takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events) or at Internet scale (the Obamacare web site fiasco).

6. Maybe a new generation of elites and/or institutions will emerge that is more adept at dealing with technology and sufficiently humble to deal with a situation in which information is more dispersed than it was last century.

I don’t want to comment on the whole book or even on Kling’s whole summary of it. I think the basic premise is enough; the public, inundated with social media, algorithmic content, and information (or misinformation) are increasingly frustrated with elites who run institutions or our political apparatus. That frustration manifests as revolts by the public against elites but, as Gurri points out, may not result in meaningful change of institutions or of politics or those changes may be slow to occur. The slowness itself is one of those sources of frustration because people expect their real-world environment to reflect the pace of change that they experience in their information environment. One way this plays out, Gurri and Kling say, is that the public is increasingly happy to empower leaders who appear anti-elitist and who promise to break institutions. Sounds familiar!

We can see these revolts happening in education. Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial win in Virginia was said to rest on the back of parents’ upset over COVID era school closures and, to some extent, trans panic only for the public to grow frustrated with Youngkin’s focus on culture war topics and elect a Democrat this time around. (Granted much of that is Trump backlash but Youngkin was very much operating in a pro-Trump policy space so it’s not like he was collateral damage from the president’s policies.) For a non-political example, we can look to the ebbing public fervor for the Science of Reading. The movement is backfiring because, just as educational institutions begin broadly rolling out SOR curriculum (because of a podcast, no less) and training to align with laws passed in the last decade, the public is beginning to call for the new hotness, the Science of Learning or is it calling for reading whole books. Or maybe we’re supposed to build knowledge once again? Because we’re living in an information environment where we are constantly flooded with “research” and “evidence” and evidence of current failures,

The point Kling/Gurri would remind us about is that the public will, through the torrent of information, latch on to some kind of school change that they think schools should undertake, grow frustrated that it isn’t happening fast enough, and look for options to either sidestep the institution or destroy it altogether. By the time institutions are ready to respond to the revolt, demands have changed. Now, this is only part of the framework and is really only talking about the effects of today’s digital information environment.

All of this brings me to the framework that I plan to use in thinking about schools this year. In the end, Gurri isn’t really doing social science and Kling, despite his economic background, is also just making an analytical argument. The model of public revolts against elites, though, came to mind recently when I was reading about the work of Gabriele Gratton, an economist and researcher at the Resilient Democracy Lab at the University of New South Wales. Gratton has spent time modeling ways that democracies have empowered populists and offers something useful for my thinking about education and politics. Namely, that liberals empower unelected technocrats to run a nation’s institutions efficiently and to achieve certain goals but, on the flip side, “technocratization” also leads to the rise of populist backlash. Gratton models how changes in majoritarian control lead to technocratic systems or backlash and reemergence of majoritarian systems. As Gratton puts it at the start of a recent paper, “In modern liberal democracies, the tension between majority rule and minority rights has increasingly manifested as a tension between majoritarian and technocratic government.” Gratton’s model, I think, holds true in education so let’s give it a more thorough explanation.

Majoritarian Control vs Technocratic Control

One thing to say at the outset is that, as Gratton notes, populists assume that technocratic control is always counter-majoritarian. Likewise, liberals are assumed to always empower technocrats to administer the state apparatus and institutions for majorities and minorities alike.

Populists accordingly view technocratic structures as counter-majoritarian devices (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2023) established by a liberal elite to implement policies that the “real people“, which constitute the “majority“, oppose.

I don’t think it’s a crazy position to assume but it’s important to note that there are some crucial suppositions that have to be in place to understand Gratton’s model. The thing to understand is that populism revolves around a perception of an in-group, what Gratton says they consider to be the “real people” of a nation or political unit. Crucially, populists see themselves and members of their groups to be a true majority and, even if not an actual majority group, will argue that others are in some way illegitimate and do not truly constitute a majority. Thus, when liberals are in power and give control institutions to technocrats or create policies that do not favor the majority, populists revolt. Gratton argues there are basically two extremes here:

At two extremes, the polity is either a stable technocratic democracy or a stable majoritarian democracy. When majorities are volatile and technocratic policies benefit different groups over time, so that a majority may be favored in one period and disfavored in another, all majorities establish technocratic democracy as insurance against the future loss of majority status. This induces a stable technocratic democracy. When majorities are more durable, all majorities prefer majoritarian institutions, leading to stable majoritarian democracy. When majoritarian stability is intermediate and technocratic policymaking consistently favors the same group over time, favored majorities delegate decisions to technocrats for intertemporal insurance; and disfavored majorities restore majoritarian democracy. This alternation results in technocratic-majoritarian cycles, with majoritarian reforms followed by technocratic ones and vice versa.

So, one major component of this majoritarian vs technocrat system is the understanding of who is in the majority, how the governing institutions and policies serve that majority, and whether or a change in the majority will protect or harm the former majority — e.g. protecting minority rights, trading short-term costs for long-term gains, gaining credibility in commitments made to citizens or in foreign relations. An important concept here is intertemporal insurance.

In fact, an intertemporal lure of technocracy emerges in our model because technocrats account for the preferences of both majorities and minorities, thereby maximizing a non-majoritarian social welfare function. All else equal, citizens prefer technocracy for the future, as it insures them against the worst-case scenario of being in the minority when policy issues that disproportionately affect them become salient. Yet, precisely because technocratic policies prioritize overall welfare, rather than majority preferences, they can ultimately provoke opposition from majorities, who may seek to dismantle them.

When a majority ceases being a majority, if they established technocratic institutions that protect minority rights, then they are in some sense insured against bad outcomes when/if they are in the minority. Because intertemporal insurance causes backlash, we have to consider the second major component of Gratton’s model: issue salience. When the technocracy chooses where to focus their attention, they are potentially choosing issues with low-salience to the majority and incurring backlash. Under their model, there are two ways that stable governance can falter. One is if majorities calcify and don’t change so they stop making policies to benefit anyone else. The other is if preferences of a social group and technocrats remain too aligned over time such that independent technocratic authorities are never responding to issues salient to majorities but to only one group.

Overall, they lay out their theoretical framework and conclusions like this:

Our central argument is that majorities fearing the loss of power in the future, but whose preferences align with the policies promoted by technocrats, are most likely to delegate policymaking to independent authorities. Using a formal model, we identified the conditions under which such a constitutional arrangement is stable in the sense that all successive majorities support it. Stable technocratic democracies may not survive, however, when societies become more stable—when either majority coalitions or the alignment of preferences between a social group and technocrats persist over time. Such social shocks can trigger frequent cycles of constitutional reforms, causing democracies to oscillate between more technocratic and more majoritarian forms of government.

and

We conclude by remarking that, beyond our model, technocratic-majoritarian cycles can pose a threat to the stability and resilience of democratic institutions. In particular, heated political debates over constitutional or institutional reforms may heighten social tensions and fuel demand for strongman leaders capable of imposing the preferences of one group on the rest of society. Such cycles can thus erode democratic institutions and create repeated opportunities for democratic backsliding. As argued in Section 3.7, strengthening checks and balances can slow democratic backsliding in the short run, but might increase its risk in the long run by making technocratic-majoritarian cycles more likely. Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, our theory suggests that democratic backsliding is particularly likely in societies with stable majorities and enduring alliances between the ruling majority and technocrats. Precisely because of this stability, a newly empowered majority opposed to technocrats has the strongest incentives to enact sweeping reforms that dismantle technocratic structures while concentrating more power in the hands of elected politicians.

Next time on Scholastic Alchemy

Next week I’ll take a look at how Gratton’s framework applies to schools, school reform, and school politics. You can probably imagine that I see education as having been thrall of technocrats for some time, hence the revolt of the public against elites and in favor of populists who seek to return control of schools to the “real people.” When framed like this, it’s easier to see where someone like Matt Yglesias gets a bit lost. As a leading liberal voice, he wants to pursue technocratic policies where dispassionate experts are the driving force behind institutions, including schools. You see that when he writes about how teachers and parents’ opposition to accountability is just some kind of feeling or preference against the unpleasantness of being told they’re poorly performing.

It’s true that this annoyed various stakeholders — not only teachers, because parents did not like hearing bad news about their school or their kids. But as adults, I think we understand that you can’t actually improve at something unless you’re willing to get some negative feedback.

I think he’s categorizing things wrong here and my hope is that Gratton’s framework helps Matt and people like him see more clearly what’s going on. Teachers and parents were not “annoyed” because they “did not like hearing bad news about their school or their kids” and it’s not because they’re refusing to be adults or to “get some negative feedback.” Rather, teachers and parents are engaged in revolts of the public against technocracy. The majorities have changed and the issues of salience have changed in ways that led to this revolt over time. I plan to explicate that in part 2 next week.

Thanks for reading!